Foodoir the New Genre of Cookbook
Secrets of the Red Lantern and Falling Cloudberries
Jun 17, 2009 Jacqueline Church
Foodoir the new genre of Cookbook. Family memoirs, studded with recipes can be sweet or bittersweet treasures for bookish cooks.
Cookbook Reviews - What do Molly Wizenberg, Giulia Melucci and David Lebovitz have in common?
One of the best parts of writing about food are the cookbooks one receives for review purposes. If one is lucky enough to get on the right publishers list, the quality of books that arrive can be surprise. So can some of the pain that is packaged, albeit beautifully, between the covers of the new genre: the "foodoir."
The Foodoir is a cross between the memoir and a food book the “foodoir” as Christine Muhlke describes it. In her review of several recent releases in the genre from Molly Wizenberg, Giulia Melucci, and David Lebovitz, she is tepid on the genre's success. Other examples she gives are Ruth Reichl and Frances Mayes. (They seem to be doing okay...)
Secrets of the Red Lantern and Falling Cloudberries - Two elegant examples from Andrews McMeel.
Two beautiful, but very different, books exemplify two extremes of the genre. Both share stories of cross-cultural family experiences, but of different sorts. In Secrets of the Red Lantern the author recounts in great detail, the significant pain in her family. She openly shares hundreds of pages of anger, bitterness, fear, sadness, longing. These are revealed in a way that feels almost embarrassingly intimate. It’s hard to imagine that something like the Vietnam war could seem almost secondary to a family’s issues.
The troubles of this family follow them through the trauma of dislocation, refugee camps, and building a new life in Australia. Difficulties exist in all families, but here they are revealed in a way that feels as if we’ve stumbled upon someone’s therapy notes. It’s a large format book and the effect of somber sepia-toned family pictures, combined with large pages of prose about pain, increase the weight of the memoir.
“Food is how we communicate”. Not an uncommon phenomenon. Here, recipes are a relief, a respite from the pain and perhaps this is deliberate construct.
Falling Cloudberries recounts a different sort of family and represents a different sort of foodoir. Here there are sweet family vignettes sprinkled among recipes. Tessa Kiros’ family is a very modern mix of various ethnicities and cross-cultural delights. A hand-drawn family tree introduces us to the Finnish, Greek-Cypriot, Russian forbears that the author remembers through their recipes.
Both foodoirs will resonate with readers who believe in the transformative power of food. Depending on the reader’s own family history, how troubled it was and how resolved it got or not, Red Lantern could be a beautiful or a difficult thing. Or maybe both.
Falling Cloudberries is another gorgeously bound and photographed book. It is a Gourmet Magazine Cookbook Club Selection. The recipes seem fairly straightforward and reflective of the various cultural threads that run through the author’s family. Rather than a revealing look into the struggles of a cross-cultural marriage or the fallout from family moves from one continent to another, then back again, we get vignettes from a happy childhood. We have to imagine there were some struggles but don’t see those, we get happy memories.
Organized by countries representative of the characters in her family, we see recipes from Finland, Greece, Cypress, South Africa, Italy, and the World - her suitcase of recipes.
Click here for Sipi’s Strawberry Cake from Falling Cloudberries. This link will also take you to more info about the book giveaway.
Drop us a comment here with your favorite foodoir title or your favorite berry recipe and you may be the lucky winner of one of these two titles.
Strawberries
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Secrets of the Red Lantern
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Falling Cloudberries
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